Developers of social platforms hope to engage users through basic game mechanics like points, levels, and leaderboards. While these features can create initial draw, they don't often lead to sustainable engagement.  This is because points, levels, and leaderboards treat users as a homogenous group of competitors who relate in a basic way. In contrast, successful social platforms support heterogenous user groups who relate in rich and complementary ways.

The most important group distinction is the one between high-level users ("masters") and low-level users ("newbies"). Master users are loyal, avid, and accomplished users -- the heart and soul of a community. Newbies represent growth. A thriving platform must successfully engage both. But how?

In my experience, one of the best ways to create sustainable engagement around a social platform is to empower master users to perform altruistic acts for newbies.

A virtuous cycle of engagement

In an ideal community, newbies and masters will need each other.  They will form what economists call a two-sided market. Newbies aspire to become masters. They need guidance from experienced users to unlock the full potential of the platform.  Masters, on the other hand, are already kings of the hill. But they need newbies just as badly. By helping newbies, they perform their mastery and experience gratification. Psychologists call it the "Helper's High," and recent neuroscience suggests that altruism releases dopamine (the pleasure hormone) and oxytocin (the bonding hormone). So you see, helping newbies can keep masters engaged with the platform in a very real way.

By designing a platform which empowers this kind of "master-newbie" altruism, developers can unlock a virtuous cycle of user engagement -- low-level users who feel looked after, and high-level users who feel fulfilled.

Let's look at some game and non-game examples of what it means to empower "master-newbie" altruism.

A game designed for master-newbie altruism

Shadow Cities is an iPhone game that's like World of Warcraft meets Foursquare. A player belongs to one of two teams, and must cooperate so that their team dominates a physical location, like downtown Manhattan. Through game mechanics like guides and followers, and emergency beacons, Shadow Cities creates a culture of master-newbie altruism, and arguably, that has become the most addictive aspect of the game.

As in WoW and other MMORPGs, master users in Shadow Cities perform two services for newbies: 1) mentor newbies about the game, and 2) protect and defend newbies when they get into trouble. A few months after the game premiered, its designers unveiled two game mechanics to explicitly empower this dynamic.

First is the system of guides and followers. Game designers added a quest to the new user playable tutorial whereby a newbie must pick a master user to be their designated guide. This has had two effects on the game's culture -- 1) master users on team chat are more helpful and outgoing, perhaps in hopes of attracting a bigger following, and 2) master users are more likely to build one-on-one relationships with newbies.

Second is the introduction of emergency beacons. Shadow Cities is a location-based game whereby players attempt to control territory, often by establishing a patrol. Newbies cry for help in team chat when their base is under siege, but if no one is available, they are discouraged and log off. With emergency beacons, players can now ask for help via push notifications. This empowers newbies, and is an organic way to re-engage master users.

A loyalty program with an altruistic twist

Starwood Hotels' Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) program is among the best designed loyalty programs out there. One reason why is their focus on the experiential aspects of achieving status. For example, their 2011 Platinum Thank You program cleverly enacts something like master-newbie altruism. SPG members with the highest status were mailed certificates that they can award to hotel staff members for being particularly helpful or kind.

Thank You's aren't worth any points to Platinum members, but that's precisely the point. It's about reinforcing one's status. Master users are granted the priceless -- the power to play Santa to working class hotel employees. It is what psychologist Albert Bandura calls a "mastery experience" -- by performing your altruistic special powers, you heighten your experience of status and achievement.

For their part, hotel employees earn SPG points and merit in their file for each Thank You received. While the master-newbie analogy is imperfect here, it's easy to see how this program engages both employees and high-status members and strengthens the community as a whole.

#FollowFriday on Twitter

When someone is "Big on Twitter," they can get stuff done that newbies can't. A user without many followers might tweet a call for help. Someone who is big on Twitter can, simply by retweeting, draw attention to the newbie's cause and amplify a message that would otherwise go unseen. Twitter celebrities know they have the power to make things go viral - a most rewarding and satisfying special power to have.

In fact the Twitter community wants to see master users engage in altruism. This is exemplified in #FollowFriday. It's a cultural tradition whereby a user promotes other users to their own followers. Users with established followings frequently use #FollowFriday to help lesser known users acquire new followers or to promote causes. Since everyone starts out with zero followers, it is only through master-newbie altruism in the form of #FollowFriday, retweets, and @mentions that any newbie can become a master in the first place.

Twitter though can clearly do more to empower master-newbie altruism. A frequent complaint by newbies disillusioned with Twitter is that they aren't engaged enough by the platform. Here the responsibility lies partially with the master users. Why aren't they doing more to help? Perhaps master users don't have stronger incentives to engage newbie users, or they perceive the existing ways to engage as being too costly (it might pollute their timeline).

The solution isn't trivial, but surely there is a game mechanic for that.

Photo courtesy of kalexanderson.

Much like in fashion, the internet has few innovators and many imitators.  It isn't that innovators create new features and imitators copy them.  Because everything is remix.  What separates the two groups, as in fashion, is a difference in taste level.  Innovators design products that feel elegant and editorial, while imitators' products are poorly executed - a mashup of features that don't hang well together.  In the fashion world, one legendary innovator possessed good taste beyond compare.  Defined by her taste level, the fashion house she founded has stood as a paragon of luxury for a hundred years.  

Her name is Coco Chanel.  Most people know her as a fashion designer.  Less widely appreciated is the fact that Coco Chanel herself was a philosopher of taste.  I'm serious about that.  Having extensively researched the intellectual history of taste, Chanel's aphorisms stand out as actionable philosophy you can live by.  It has informed my life and design practice tremendously.  In fact, if Coco Chanel were a product designer in consumer internet, I bet she would do amazing things, because taste is what matters most.  Think along the lines of NOTCOT, Gilt Groupe, and Twitter.

A striking many of Coco Chanel's maxims and precepts speak to product and user experience design.  The following are what I've gleaned to be her greatest teachings: 

On feature quality vs. quantity. "Luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity." Translation: An elegant product doesn't necessarily need a lot of features (ornateness), but the features it does have need to work fluidly and be well thought through (absence of vulgarity).  There can't be gaffs.

Naked prototypes. "Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress."  Great design (dress) can bring out the best in a product, but it can't mask the lack of underlying substance (woman).  For these reasons, it can be useful to start with a "naked" prototype - functional and undesigned.  Get a group of people using the naked prototype regularly to see if it adds value and feels substantive.  For example, before developing the Palm Pilot, Jeff Hawkins carried around a block of wood for a week and pretended to use it as if it were built out.

Too many accessories. "When accessorizing, always take off the last thing you put on."  After a website or app has built its core features (the dress), the temptation is to pursue auxiliary features (accessories) that maybe an early user has requested.  These features are green-lighted because product designers often feel the need to be hyper-responsive to users, rather than being the bad guy.  The head of engineering also favors auxiliary features because they offer good visibility from a planning perspective, and this person usually measures progress by lines of code completed, not by product efficacy.  This is how accessory features sneak into products.  Chanel warns against this outcome. She assumes that no matter who you are and what your taste level (indeed many of her clients to whom she gave this advice had very good taste), you will overdo the accessories.  So, consider editing your non-core features hawkishly.  Don't be afraid to remove ones which add little value and instead distract from the core substance of the product.

The myth of user-generated content. "Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger."  A lot of social media sites assume that a lot of their users will be heavy contributors.  They then proceed to design a product geared only toward heavy contributors.  This is wrong-headed.  Less than 0.5% of a site's users (often FAR less than) are heavy contributors.  Many successful UGC sites were built on the backs of a handful of marquee users.  Twitter, a site that has disproportionately many heavy contributors, has a passive user base that dwarfs the base of users who tweet regularly.  In April 2010, Twitter had 100 million registered users, but almost twice that number in daily users.  The vast majority of Twitter users tweet infrequently, or simply read the site without registering.  This proportion of tweeters to readers makes sense because one of Twitter's core value propositions is distribution.  Thus, their app must work well as a read-only app.

Heavily trafficked sites. "Nothing is ugly as long as it is alive."  Once in a while I get into an argument with product designer friends about Craigslist.  Some really disagree with its draconian look and call it "ugly." They see it as a missed opportunity for something great.  I tend to think it's unfair to criticize a site (it's not ugly) that has been consistently and heavily trafficked (it is alive).  Maybe users feel comfortable using Craigslist as they would their old newspaper classifieds precisely because it looks like their old newspaper classified, and nothing more.  As Chanel also said, "luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury."

Not many people think of email as a game.  After all, games are meant to be fun. Email, on the other hand, is laborious and stressful and makes you stop breathing.  But email has at least one game-like quality - the thrill of victory when you defeat your inbox, achieving Inbox Zero.  It's like slaying a dragon, man.  If you think that's hyperbolic, consider Merlin Mann's preface to Inbox Zero - a veritable player's guide to email: "It’s about how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life."

Email is a game of numbers where progress is measured by a single statistic - the count of unread messages. Whereas we're pleased to see many stats (points, followers, @mentions) count up, we battle desperately to keep the number of unreads in single digits.  As email became ubiquitous, the unread indicator became iconic.  Web and mobile apps adopted it for their app-specific inboxes.  More recently, the arms race toward gamification has emboldened app designers to try the unread indicator in ever more aggressive contexts.  Unread tweets.  Unread system notifications. Unread recent activity?  Things have gotten out of hand.

As with all design patterns, the unread indicator can be used well, and it can be overdone.  The rest of this post discusses some key considerations surrounding the indicator's use.

The Great Unread Message Inflation

You open up Twitter's Android app and see 2100 unread tweets since last night.  It seems you've been attacked by the night of the living unread!  Immediately your head explodes.  Unread messages feel like this decade's Viagra spam.  Everything on the internet *wants* to be an unread message.  But they needn't be.  It's a bit awkward to think of tweets as messages that need to be queued for reading.  First, unless a tweet is addressed (@reply is like "To"; @mention is like "Cc"), there isn't really a recipient so much as an audience.  Second, Twitter is not meant to be "read" in its entirety, and many loved it precisely for not being an inbox.  Third, unaddressed tweets don't require priority in the same sense that emails do.  After all, missing an important email could get you fired or damage a friendship. 

The stress factor

At its best, the unread indicator reminds users that an app is full of activity and participation.  It draws the user's attention, invites them to act, and gives them a sense of control.  But app designers should also weigh potential costs to the user. 

few unreads [useful, motivating] <----> tons unread [stressful, intimidating]

The indicator carries psychological baggage from its original use in email.  A few unreads might create a constructive sense of urgency.  But when inboxes overwhelm their owners, urgency is replaced by stress, frustration, and intimidation.  My friend Linda Stone observed hundreds of people using email and found that 80% (!) of them held their breath or hyperventilated while doing so.  So the stressful association of email seems pretty widespread.  In short, unread indicators are not necessarily harmless; used in the wrong context, they can lead users to associate your app with a stressful rather than game-like experience.

Too many unreads

When you call customer service and there's a wait to speak to an operator, 15 minutes might be acceptable. But if the wait is more than 30 minutes, research in queueing theory says that you're far more likely to just give up.  Unread messages are a lot like wait time.  A few unreads are actionable.  But when there are too many unreads, you might just give up on taking any actions.  App designers should reflect on the likelihood that their users will encounter 20+, 50+, or 100+ unreads.  If the likelihood is very high, perhaps the unread indicator is no longer serving one of its key purposes - creating a sense of actionability.

In recent years there have been some notable efforts to help email users ensmallen their unread counts.

• Gmail's Priority Inbox keeps a separate count for more important email messages.
• GTD Inbox allows actionable messages to be flagged and tracked separately.
• The Email Game helps users divide and conquer overflowing inboxes by limiting each game to 30 unread messages.

Visual priority

Apple's white-on-red graphical badge is an iconic form for the unread indicator.  Red is the most eye catching color, so this badge design has the highest visual priority.  On the Mac, a few icons like Mail, iChat, and Skype are decorated with an unread badge, but the percentage of total screen space they occupy is slight.  However, on the iPhone, there are likely many more unread badges than seen on Mac, all squeezed into a smaller footprint in the home screen.  The high visual priority of the badge seems to be counter-productive in this context, becoming a distraction or even a nuisance.  Aggravating the situation, some of the badges feel like permanent fixtures and cannot be disabled.  There may always be unread Mail, but that badge can't be disabled. And is it absolutely necessary to treat App Store available updates as unreads? 

Many web apps have followed Apple's design lead with their own white-on-red badges.  Facebook's use is particularly encouraging because it demonstrates awareness of visual priority.  Facebook actually uses three tiers of visual priority for their unread indicators.  Requests and messages are shown with white-on-red badges (highest priority) when they are brand new.  Once viewed, the unread badges are demoted to blue-on-light-blue.  The most recent news items count is shown with an even lower priority white-on-blue design.

"Mark all as read"

Given that unread indicators can be stressful and even overwhelming, it's important to give users a way to quickly regain control of the situation.  As a rule of thumb, the less important the unread, the easier it should be to clear.  Facebook's highest priority badge clears automatically when the appropriate dashboard icon is clicked. Quora puts a "Clear All Notifications button" just below the list of notifications.  In Gmail, Mark All is now a handy button.  Or, if one seeks total liberation, one Gmail Labs feature eliminates the unread count entirely.  If email is a game, then that is the ultimate cheat.  

Read part IV of the Game-Like Mechanics series here →

Video games offer a possibility rarely had in real life - the satisfaction of being truly madly deeply 100% complete.

Beating Grand Theft Auto IV will take two weeks.  But then again, the main story line is only 68% of the game.  To reach 100% complete, you'll have to finish umpteen side quests, like chasing down 200 pigeons, and meeting random pedestrians.  It can take hundreds of hours. And the prize for getting 100% complete?  Well, there isn't one really.

In fact, 100% completions rarely lead to big juicy rewards. At most it helps unlock an easter egg.  For example, when you beat Xenosaga, you get to save "Clear Data" to the memory card.  In the sequel, this lets you equip a geriatric swimsuit. A nice gesture, but not a reward that would seem to justify hundreds of hours of toil.  So why then do so many gamers fall under the spell of compulsive completion?

Because completion is intrinsically rewarding.  Neuroscience backs this up.  It turns out that when you finish a complex task, your brain releases massive quantities of endorphins.  Through the magic of classical conditioning, you come to associate present acts of completion and progress with the pleasure and satisfaction of your past completion-induced endorphin rushes.

The "need to complete" is a powerful motivator. Properly harnessed, this observation can help you create engaging user experiences for your app or website.  And since completion is intrinsically satisfying, it isn't as gimmicky as some extrinsic rewards.

Let's look at one game-like design pattern that leverages this "need to complete" - the profile completion bar.

PROFILE COMPLETION BAR.  Last time we looked at how OkCupid onramps new users with an innovative tutorial system.  The tutorial asks new users to take a series of small steps toward a complete profile.  Progress toward this goal is communicated by a blue profile completion bar (0% to 100%).  The idea of progress is central to games.  Game theorists Salen & Zimmerman put it thusly in Rules of Play: "Without a measure of progress to give a player feedback on the meaning of his or her decisions, meaningful play is not possible."

Progress itself is the reward.  Notice how the language of the tutorial promotes this idea: "Take action X to get to 60% complete." Why would a user comply?  First, a great way to get users to do something is simply to tell them to do it.  Next, as this post claims, many users will feel rewarded when they advance progress toward 100%.  Then of course, there are users who rather loathe incompletion, but this is a glass half-full / half-empty thing. 

Progress bars must only advance, and never move back. Progress is sacrosanct in games, and there are no takebacks.  Unless you're Chutes and Ladders.  This reminds me of a design commandment I fondly attribute to my friend and Hunch colleague Caterina Fake: "Thou shalt not taketh away."  This property of in-game progress bars set them apart from the more dubious sort that you find in Windows installers and file transfer modals.  Those charlatan "progress bars" jump back, rush to 90% and stall, or make otherwise indeterminate movements.

More scavenger hunt, less like filling your taxes.  That's the ideal feel for tasks that you ask users to complete.  OkCupid's quests are fun, but the site is also inherently playful. LinkedIn, on the other hand, deals with a drier subject matter. There may be some tasks that users simply won't want to do -- such as asking another LinkedIn user for a recommendation.  Perhaps recognizing this, LinkedIn implemented a profile completion bar that has side-quest mechanics.  For example, "adding your summary"" gets you +5%.  "Asking for another recommendation" also gets you +5%.  In this design, users are able avoid certain steps and make progress in the manner of their choosing.

An extrinsic reward, just in case.  Alas, not all your users will be seduced by the need to complete.  Give them an external motive.  LinkedIn woos with this zinger: "Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn." This leads us to next week's pattern - the need to eat.

jk.

Read part III of the Game-Like Mechanics series here →

Product people in consumer internet have game envy.  Everything should be as fun and engaging as Super Mario Kart.  This agenda is emboldened by the success of Foursquare - the half-app, half- alternate reality game.  Game mechanics such as points, leaderboards, badges, and mayorships are what make Foursquare more engaging, addictive, and successful than all the other location apps.

Now other apps are eager to jump on the game mechanics bandwagon.  Badges, for example, are suddenly cropping up everywhere.  But in some cases, their use feels contrived, or even worse, users begin to feel manipulated.  It's important to realize that explicit game mechanics may not be appropriate for all apps.

Instead, consider incorporating game-like mechanics to engage users.  These are design patterns that come from videogame theory, but importantly, they aren't overtly videogame-y.  Since they don't cry out: "I'm from a video game," game-like mechanics may be suitable for a broader range of apps.

I stumbled upon game-like mechanics whilst cataloging user engagement techniques for my own design practice at Hunch.  When I shared my findings with colleagues and friends, there was disagreement over whether certain patterns were actually game mechanics. These patterns engage users using videogame theory, but aren't recognized as iconic like leaderboards and badges.  Thenceforth I've been calling this class of patterns game-like mechanics. I used my cohorts' objections as the litmus test.

I expect to write a short series about game-like mechanics.  One pattern per post.  The first pattern I want to share is...

THE "IN-GAME" TUTORIAL

Onboarding is often mistaken for account creation.  But user acquisition is actually just the first of four steps. Accommodation, assimilation and acceleration are the other steps.  In videogame speak, the onboarding process is accomplished by an in-game tutorial.  Adventure and RPG games use warm-up levels to get your basic information, show you the ropes, and accelerate you into the flow of the game.  A tutorial can take five minutes. Or it can span six mini-missions and take an hour, as in the case of Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days.  (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

If your web or mobile app is complicated like Kingdom Hearts, you should definitely consider a tutorial system.  Because dumping users to the home screen to figure out their own use case is UX purgatory.  For an example of a tutorial system in a complicated product, we look at Facebook. After you create an account, you're brought to a Welcome page.  The page lists six basic, actionable steps for the user to complete - search for friends, upload photo, fill out profile, activate phone, find people, and set privacy.  When possible, the form or button required to complete the step is in-lined so the action can occur right then and there.  Facebook's tutorial isn't exactly fun, but it gets the job done.

A lighter-weight tutorial system is the hovering callout where the voice of the app speaks to you.  For example, after you create an account at Aardvark and land on the home screen, a callout tooltip in the upper right corner tells you that the first thing to do is to ask a question. The link is included. Simple and elegant.  After you've done that, the tutorial callout tells you to try some other action, and so forth.

Note that in-game tutorials are different from tours.  Tours might explain how to do something, but tutorials get you to take steps yourself. A powerful idea. 

OkCupid has one of the most impressive in-game tutorials.  After creating an account, OkCupid prompts users to take one action that will advance their progress on the site.  In total, users are asked to take ten or so steps toward crafting a profile (e.g. add a photo, add some tags) and connecting with the community (e.g. write a forum post).  OkCupid's tutorial is better than the rest because it rewards users for completing steps.  They accomplish this with help from another design pattern: the PROFILE COMPLETION BAR.

Read part II here →]]> Tue, 9 Nov 2010 05:18:11 -0600 http://larifari.org/blog/game-like-mechanics-tutorial/